6

Peasants and their crops

This chapter deals mainly with cultivation, and the next with livestock, though separating the two is difficult because they were so closely connected. To make judgements about the effectiveness of the agriculture practised by peasants we must consider the management of fields, methods of husbandry, farming techniques, and the changing balance between arable and pasture.

Fields and their regulation

In the champion districts of the west midland region compact nucleated villages usually divided their land between two fields, occasionally three (see ‘The west midland region’ in Chapter 2). Crops were grown on one field while the other (in the predominant two-field arrangement) was left fallow, to be reversed in the next year. Each field was subdivided into dozens of furlongs each containing groups of selions, also called ridges or lands. A village’s fields contained at least 2,000 of these strips; they were long and narrow, so that the plough turned around as infrequently as possible. A very high proportion of the land lay in arable fields, often in excess of four-fifths, and some villages lacked extensive meadow, pasture, and wood (Figure 6.1 shows a champion village with an almost complete field system, remains of which survived as ridge and furrow until the 1940s). The animals obtained much of their grazing from the vegetation on the fallow field. The typical peasant holding in such villages c.1300 was distributed in many strips, evenly divided between the fields. The ploughed land and the common rights were subject to regulation by the community, though the management of the holding was ultimately the responsibility of the individual household. Cotswold fields were organized in a similar way, but often had access to hill pasture. In the woodlands of the north and west, the open fields bore some resemblance to those of the champion, but they occupied a smaller proportion of the village territory; each was relatively small in size, and they numbered at least five. Peasants lived in hamlets or individual farms, each holding strips of land usually distributed unevenly over the open fields, and also a number of crofts, closes, and hedged parcels used for arable or grazing. The closes were thrown open at defined times for common grazing, along with the open pasture, heath, moor, and meadow, which could be extensive. ¹

Figure 6.1 Compton Verney, Warwickshire. This two-field Feldon village is shown in the upper map in outline c.1300. The modern landscape in the lower map is based on aerial photographs of the 1940s and some field observation. Ridge and furrow represent the survival of strips, headlands, and furlongs on which cultivation ceased c.1460. The upper map shows the distribution of pottery from field walking in 1998–9 (see ‘Farming methods and techniques’ in this chapter) (source: note 75).

What part did peasants play in devising these divergent ways of organizing the countryside? The environment had an underlying influence on types of fields, and it has been argued that the heavy clays of the champion made it essential to have efficient ways of assembling plough teams, for which nucleated villages were well suited. However many open-field villages were cultivating the light gravelly soils of the river valleys, or the stony calcareous earth of the wolds, which did not challenge the ploughman as much as the sticky clay of south-east Warwickshire or Worcestershire. It should be remembered that plough teams had to be brought together by those living in vills formed from groups of hamlets in the woodlands. The environment is not in any case an answer to the question, ‘who made the fields?’, because the soils, climate, and relief provided a context, not a driving force, and decisions and choices about fields resulted from a range of influences and pressures. ²

The origins of the fields belong to an early medieval period, when a seventh-century law code refers to peasants regulating shared land, and a general restructuring and intensification of farming has been proposed as occurring in the long eighth century. The earliest evidence for open fields in the west midlands comes from charter boundaries written in the tenth and eleventh centuries. ³ At that date both village communities and estate management by lords could have been involved in setting up fields. The formative factors behind the emergence of the open fields included the definition of specific village territories, later called townships, and sometimes coincident with parishes and manors which typically contained 1,000–3,000 acres. The inhabitants were expanding their ploughed land, in which process arable and pasture needed to be balanced, so that mixed farming could be practised. The best solution was to separate arable from grassland, but to allow livestock onto the corn fields when they were not being cultivated. Rotations and fallowing had to be agreed, co-ordinated, and regulated. In order to secure consent to this coordination of cultivation, the participants were guaranteed equality in the distribution of land, and a fair allocation of good land and less fertile land. Everyone had a stake in the fields, but also in cultivation, because the ploughs, beasts, and labour of cultivation were shared. In order to benefit, everyone also had to accept commitments of work and animals. The fields may originally have been rectangular parcels, but as holdings were divided between heirs, and land held jointly was allocated to individuals, the land was fragmented into smaller subdivisions. The most convenient parcel was a narrow strip, and this was ploughed to form a ridge, for drainage but also to help to define the boundaries between strips, which were not fenced or ditched. The whole arrangement depended on comprehensive multiple contracts between people of similar social rank, and therefore based on the peasant community. ⁴

By the time that we can observe in detail the functioning of the fields in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries both lords and peasants were participating in the routines. Some lords’ demesnes consisted of scattered strips intermingled with the holdings of the peasants, meaning that lords rotated their crops and joined in the cycle of common grazing. Lords with ‘block’ demesnes could not manage the land with complete independence, as common grazing was customary on the demesne when it lay fallow. Lords clearly had an incentive to involve themselves in the management of the field system, because the profit of the demesne was at stake, and the efficiency of peasant farming might have consequences for the lords’ rent. ⁵

The role of both lords and tenants can be seen in the by-laws announced in the manor court. They sometimes use a conventional formula implying general agreement by the ‘whole homage’ or ‘all tenants’. The role of the lord’s representative is given prominence at Southrop (Gloucestershire) in 1409, when the ‘steward and the suitors’ ordered tenants to arrange for livestock to be supervised (by the common herdsman, we presume). Even when the by-law came from the steward, as at Rockhampton (Gloucestershire) in 1419 it was thought appropriate to add ‘by assent of all tenants’. ⁶

The by-laws were not focussed on the central disciplines of the arable fields, such as the boundaries between one strip and another, which were potentially controversial. The need to fix stones or posts, and the offence of moving them are mentioned very rarely. Instead, the preoccupations of the law makers and enforcers was to minimize the damage that livestock could cause to crops. The order that pigs should have rings placed in their noses (to discourage them from destructive rooting) was often repeated and clearly not obeyed. When the leading villagers made a serious effort to ensure enforcement of the rules by appointing a panel of harvest reeves or harvest wardens, their principal concern was not the cutting and carrying of the corn. Rather they focussed on preventing animals trespassing in corn fields before the corn had been carried, or on growing crops at other times of the year. This preoccupation with the interface between livestock and arable lends support to the view that the open-field system originated in the need to co-ordinate cultivation and grazing, and was perpetuated by that priority.

A fundamental question was the membership of the community, and therefore who was entitled to enjoy common rights in the fields and pastures. In 1393 the court at Eldersfield (Worcestershire) identified Thomas Clerk of Stanton (an adjoining village) as keeping seven cattle on a pasture for which he had no entitlement; two years later John Otar was found to be pasturing animals ‘but is not a commoner’. ⁷ More often people were making more general encroachments across boundaries, such as the invasion of Harvington’s territory by the men of Sheriff’s Lench reported in 1388. ⁸ These problems often arose from intercommoning arrangements, by which villages shared pastures according to agreed rules, but they did not always work together amicably (see ‘Animal welfare’ in Chapter 7). Again the livestock’s access to the fields, not the arable crops, preoccupied the lawmakers.

In the early fourteenth century opinion in villages and estates was obviously exercised by the problem of the theft of corn in the harvest (see ‘Village community’ in Chapter 4). Legislators occasionally returned to this problem for the next hundred years. Workers hired from outside the village were regarded as potential thieves. Villagers were told not to pay them with sheaves, as corn given as pay might be confused with stolen crops. Gleaners, usually a small group of elderly and poor women from the village, were regarded with suspicion along with strangers who invaded the harvest fields to glean. Distrust spread to householders and tenants who carted corn at night, and who had entrances into the adjacent fields from the rear of their closes. Perhaps cultivators and estate managers, troubled by disappointing returns, were looking for someone to blame.

The date when the sown field should be closed to livestock, or the beginning and end of hay making, the day when cutting and carrying corn should begin, or the moment when the corn had been removed and the stubble could be thrown open for grazing were crucial events for the cultivators, but they were not decided in by-laws. The time for each event changed from year to year depending on weather patterns. In 1337 at Cropthorne (Worcestershire) a time was given for the beginning of the harvest, but we do not know who authorized this. At Uley (Gloucestershire) in 1479 the completion of the harvest and the opening of the corn field for grazing was decided by the farmer and the bailiff. The day for the end of the harvest at Ham in the Vale of Berkeley (Gloucestershire) was chosen by ‘the neighbours’ in 1462. ⁹ These routine but important deliberations were presumably often made by a village meeting, based on local knowledge and wisdom. They probably also prepared matters for the manor court, such as proposals for by-laws. Peasant communities clearly took decisions without the lord’s knowledge, and consequently their deliberations were not formally documented.

Changing agriculture: Managing the fields

Peasants had to adjust their farming methods and field organization in the period of growth in the thirteenth century, and they had to adapt in the following centuries to a more thinly settled countryside.

Peasants in the thirteenth century took a leading role in the assarting of land and the extension of the arable area in the woodland landscapes. They have been portrayed in positive terms, as bold initiators of an expanding economy, who worked hard for their own benefit but also for the rest of society. Some scepticism has to be applied to this whole episode, as the growth in population in the woodlands does not seem so great, nor were landscapes everywhere transformed. Occasionally we see the movement of assarts across an area of waste resembling the advance of a frontier, but more often expansion of cultivation took the form of a piecemeal series of small-scale encroachments. ¹⁰

The colonizers faced opposition from powerful interests, including the crown which was enforcing forest law in the thirteenth century, and the great lords who valued their private forests, the chases. They were protecting the habitat of the deer they intended to hunt but the forests could also generate revenue as offenders against the vert (vegetation) could be made to pay substantial penalties. The motives for promoting forest law cannot be easily disentangled. ¹¹ Through the region, individual lords managed woods for their timber, coppice wood, and grazing, and appointed woodwards to make peasants pay if they took trees and underwood without permission. They often surrounded their woods with banks and fences. Parks were created by lords, usually in woodland landscapes, taking in existing woods and wastes, but occasionally former agricultural land. Enclosure with a strong pale kept herds of deer inside, discouraged human intruders, and served as barriers to the further expansion of peasant agriculture. Well over 200 parks are known in the region mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, each enclosing as much as 1,000 acres, and commonly between 20 and 400 acres. ¹² Lords might also calculate that they could make more profit from cultivation, and they themselves cleared their woods and heaths, and allow peasants to colonize in order to gain rents from new tenant holdings.

The attitudes of the peasants were similarly ambiguous. They resented the oppressions of forest law, which cost them money and also made them vulnerable to local forest officials who regularly abused their powers. On the other hand the fines were not so high as to make their assarts unprofitable, and the physical environment of the forest, with its under-utilized land, raw materials, and fuel presented them with opportunities. They also raided lords’ woods regularly, and were prepared to pay the fines. Although forest law and lords’ preservation of their woods did not prevent the clearance of new land, and was not intended to do so, it does seem to have inhibited peasants and other would-be developers. This discouragement could have been a factor in the survival of considerable areas of wooded land, heaths, and moors at the end of the colonizing movement of the thirteenth century.

Although peasants may have been frustrated by the lords’ protection of the natural environment, both lords and peasants showed caution in extending cultivation. They saw the merits of maintaining extensive pastures, and in their own way peasant communities campaigned against the enclosure and cultivation of their common grazing grounds (see ‘Peasants and the environment’ in Chapter 10). Individual peasants offended by putting hedges or fences around pieces of common land, often on the side of an existing road, and denying neighbours right of entry. They were then free to plough the land and plant crops as they wished. Every new close or croft created in this way deprived those who used the pasture of some grazing land. Each enclosure was small, usually below 2 acres, and made little difference to the capacity of a large common, but a principle was at stake, and cumulatively a succession of encroachments could be damaging to a community. The encloser could obtain permission from the lord, who would (after negotiation) set the terms of tenancy and the annual rent, creating a bond of common purpose between lord and tenant. The community’s reaction could take many forms. They could bring a legal action (novel disseisin) alleging that they had been deprived wrongly of pasture rights. When the king’s judges held an itinerant court in Warwickshire in 1221 they dealt with seventeen novel disseisin cases. ¹³ In a typical example three tenants of Ashow in central Warwickshire, on the edge of the Arden, complained that because of Geoffrey de Semilly they had lost common pasture which belonged to their free tenements in the vill. No details are given, but an encroachment on the common was the likely source of the dispute. Geoffrey admitted the disseisin. The parties could come to a settlement. An agreement recorded at Ashleworth in Gloucestershire, around 1240 between the Abbot of St Augustine’s at Bristol and Roger de Derneford allowed enclosure in the common of Ashleworth and the wood of Corse. Free tenants objected, but surrendered their rights of common in exchange for payments from the Abbey: William de Morcote received £2 13s 4d, John de Stanton 13s 4d, and so on. ¹⁴

Although the lords arranged the agreements, it was often tenants who made the enclosures, and their neighbours from the same village or nearby villages who raised objections, indicating conflicts of interest among peasants. The disputes could lead to direct action, when groups of objectors removed hedges in the night. They were accused of riotous behaviour, but the groups were mounting a purposeful and disciplined campaign against the offending enclosures, usually without violence. ¹⁵ A particularly large scale and persistent episode was provoked by enclosures by people from Alvechurch in north Worcestershire on two commons, West Heath and Dodenhaleshey, on which the inhabitants of King’s Norton also had rights of grazing. ¹⁶ The conflict stretched over the period between 1273 and 1287. Some of the opponents of the enclosures were leading villagers of King’s Norton, but these were not just quarrels among the elite of the villages. On the Alvechurch side, a tenant of modest means on the disputed land was Henry de Ickenildestrete (taking his name from a nearby Roman road) who held an acre for an annual rent of 12d at Dodenhaleshey, and a plot in the hamlet of Rowney Green. ¹⁷

Small fields with irregular boundaries established in the thirteenth century by peasants such as Henry de Ickenildestrete were visible at West Heath Farm in the late nineteenth century, and also a large area of open heath land survived. Open common pasture can still be seen at Corse, suggesting that opposition to enclosure met with partial success.

Innovations in champion field management also reveal divisions of interest within peasant communities. Demand for cereals and legumes increased in the thirteenth century as the village populations grew. For example, in the group of small villages administered from Tredington (Warwickshire) the forty-eight tenants listed in the late twelfth century had increased to sixty-two by 1299. ¹⁸ More grain was needed for bread, ale, and fodder, not just in the producing villages, but also in towns. For example, grain from Tredington, which apparently had a high reputation, was carried as far as Worcester. ¹⁹ The cultivated area could not be increased as little waste or wood was left. A possible solution in the champion was to increase the area of arable planted each year by changing from two fields to three, and three fields are known in a handful of villages in central Gloucestershire and in north-east Warwickshire. ²⁰ The great majority of champion villages kept their two fields, not necessarily in a spirit of conservative resistance to change, nor in ignorance of the potential benefits. The practical problems of reordering the whole complex arrangements of furlongs would have been daunting, while the increase in the cultivated area would have reduced the area for grazing, and more frequent cropping might have had negative effects on yields. ²¹ No doubt the possibilities were debated at village meetings, and usually the opponents of three fields prevailed.

Inhoking provided a more flexible way of increasing the area under cultivation without permanent transformations of the fields. An area of the fallow field would be surrounded by temporary fencing and ploughed and planted, so that part of the field would carry crops in two successive years. This practice became commonplace in villages in south-east Worcestershire and north Gloucestershire by the fourteenth century, for which lords gave permission. The conditions that were sometimes required suggest an awareness of the disadvantages, such as the stipulation by the abbot of Winchcomb that villagers inhoking land at Hailes (Gloucestershire) in 1296 would pay 2d per acre in compensation for the loss of grazing. ²² Conflicting interests emerged from a dispute at Shipston-on-Stour. This agricultural community’s economy was stimulated by the adjacent new town, and it had a tradition of antagonism to its lord and quarrelling between neighbours. William Robins, a member of a prominent family, having obtained the agreement of the lord of the manor, fenced off a furlong of the fallow field and in the spring of 1342 planted it with pulse and barley. ²³ The Shipston community responded by driving their cattle over the planted area, destroying the crops, and restoring the land to its proper use (in their eyes) as common pasture. Their actions were directed both at the ambitious Robins, and the lord who had supported him. The response to this direct action came from Robins in litigation before the lord’s court, in which he claimed compensation for his loss of crops. Smaller scale inhoking continued at Shipston, followed again by litigation similar to that mounted by Robins: in 1378 Henry Mogge’s barley was damaged by three tenants, and his pulse was destroyed in a separate incident. ²⁴

Despite the problems that inhoking caused, the practice persisted. It could be favoured by the community, like the whole homage at Alveston (Warwickshire) which obtained a licence to inhoke two furlongs in 1340. Around Elmley Castle (Worcestershire) the lord gave permission regularly, allowing Little Comberton in 1444 to inhoke a furlong. ²⁵ Elsewhere we find more references to the same practice, called hechyng, and to divisions within a field called the Hiche. The ultimate development was to call parts of the fields ‘every years’ land’ and to cease to have any fallow, or to intensify cultivation by changing from two fields to four fields. This was more easily achieved than introducing a three-field system, because each of the two fields could be split in two. However in theory it was a very radical modification of the farming system, as instead of a half of the arable fields being cropped each year, three-quarters were planted, and for fallow grazing the animals were confined to the limited space of a quarter of the fields. In practice the imbalance between arable and pasture was avoided by setting aside part of the fields as permanent or at least long-term pasture, often called leys. In addition one of the four courses was devoted entirely to pulse, which was intended as a fodder crop and therefore supported livestock, and in particular sheep. By no coincidence, the first village in the region to be recorded (in 1387) with four fields was Blackwell, next to Shipston ²⁶ (Figure 2.4 shows a village’s transition from two to four fields).

The decision to adopt a four-field system was often taken in a shadowy undocumented village meeting, and therefore the first indication comes from a simple statement that a holding was spread over four fields, perhaps many years after the change had been made. An exception was the village of Adlestrop (Gloucestershire) in 1498, where the court of Evesham Abbey approved the inception of the new four-field system, without making clear who was the initiator. ²⁷ The monastery was not involved directly in the agriculture of Adlestrop, as the demesne was being leased by a farmer, though the farmer may have encouraged the lord’s interest by recommending a reform of the fields. He had a say in the agreement as he was given an assurance that under the new rules he could drive his sheep through a several field called le Ferdych. The tenants had an area ‘at the far end of the fields’ in le hechyng, so they were already cultivating part of the fallow field. However, under the new four-field arrangement they were ordered to plant the hechyng according to the old rotation (ab antiquo), with fallow years. The new order, made with the assent of all tenants, was to follow the rotation of fallow, barley, pulse, and wheat, ‘so that they have four fields’ and ‘none may sow in a field seed other than that ordered’. The authority of the Abbey added to the strength of the supporters of the change, as we should regard with suspicion the conventional phrase ‘with the assent of all tenant’. The balance of farming in favour of pasture was adjusted in parallel with the introduction of the new rotation. No acreages are specified at Adlestrop, but at Welford-on-Avon, a Warwickshire village which had also divided its land into four fields, in the early sixteenth century, 143 acres of the 1,045 acres of potential arable, amounting to 14 per cent, was described as uncultivated and therefore under grass, much of it ‘on the hill’, so in a less accessible part of the field system. ²⁸

The objective of all these changes was to keep as many animals as possible grazing on the fallow field and uncultivated arable, while supplementing their fodder with peas and beans. Arable production could be focussed on a relatively small area on which manure could be concentrated, and where the rotation ensured that wheat (the most valued crop) followed on from the legumes, which would increase the nitrogen available in the soil, and potentially maximize the yield.

Enclosure has been conventionally regarded as an existential threat to traditional field systems, and it has been over dramatized as an imposition by ruthless profiteering lords which in some villages brought the open fields and peasant farming to an end in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Enclosures had a long history, and can be observed in charters and archaeological excavations from before the twelfth century. In the woodlands from c.1150 onwards both old and new closes and crofts could have been seen in their thousands across the region from the Malverns to the Avon, and in the Vale in Gloucestershire.

Enclosed fields were carved out of the woods in the assarting movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but piecemeal enclosure continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of the nineteen licensed enclosures in the long series of Halesowen records, thirteen belong to the period 1350–1450. ²⁹ A peak in unlicensed enclosures at Ombersley was reached in 1463, when nineteen were the subjects of complaints to the manor court. The statement in the Ombersley court for 1462 that ‘John Naissche enclosed a parcel of land in le Brannt’ could have two meanings. ³⁰ Firstly enclosure could refer to the erection of a fence, digging a ditch, raising a bank, planting a hedge, or (in the Cotswolds only) building a wall for the first time around a plot of common waste, commonly called an encroachment or purpresture. The same process in an open field could result from an adjacent group of selions or butts on the edge of the field, or near the tenant’s house, being brought together by purchase or exchange. Secondly, enclosure could also mean extending a greater degree of control over the separate land by excluding grazing animals in the ‘open time’, that is, after the harvest or when the close was subject to fallow. The tenant holding the enclosure was expected to leave gates or gaps in the hedge open through which livestock could enter. Again clear divisions of interest set peasants against one another. Those who complained about unauthorized enclosure saw a threat to their ability to feed their animals, and used their influence in the manor court to protect their interests. Those who held the closes wished to reserve any grass that they contained for their own beasts, and valued the option of cultivating their own land in the fallow year. Such tenants could also hope for aid from the lord. A compromise might be found, as at Longdon (Worcestershire) in 1455 after a series of enclosures had been presented as offending against custom. When tenants were making new closes in the waste they were told to observe the custom ‘of old’ (ex antiquo) by allowing access in the open time, but they could choose one close to hold as ‘several’ for their exclusive use. ³¹

The decision to enclose did not always involve confrontation, or at least ways could be found to make the enclosure acceptable to its potential opponents. Tenants went to the lord of Stoke Prior, Worcestershire, in 1351 to seek permission to enclose parcels of meadow. This was a typical project to extend enclosure in an already partly enclosed woodland landscape, adjoining a curtilage and ‘a field called Cornecroft’, but the neighbours presumably needed to be placated and the applicants secured ‘the consent of the whole court’. ³² The community at Bockleton (Worcestershire) treated a potential offender with flexibility. Alice Wyot in 1440 expressed a wish to enclose a field called Denefeld at all times, so preventing any common grazing. She was told that the land should be opened after the harvest each year, and in every third year when it lay fallow. The neighbours however made a concession ‘out of love of Alice’ that she could keep it completely enclosed in her lifetime, if she gave a half pound of wax to the church. ³³ The villagers preferred a community asset to benefit, not the lord.

An apparently paradoxical feature of the regulation of enclosure was that, alongside the reports of unlicensed enclosure which was in particular eroding the amount of available common pasture in the woodlands, another stream of complaints, presentments, and by-laws related to the failure of tenants to maintain their existing hedges. They were required to block gaps and maintain gates. These rules often related to the long and complex hedges that surrounded the cultivated open fields and protected the crops from livestock. The need for precautions continued from the planting of corn in October and November, until the harvest season in the following year when livestock could damage the ripening corn and the cut sheaves. As common fields were cultivated in both champion and woodland landscapes, this fencing and hedging campaign applied everywhere. Individual tenants who suffered from animals straying into the closes around their houses brought pleas of trespass against the owners of the beasts, seeking compensation for grass eaten and gardens trampled. These problems arose from poor maintenance of hedges and fences, the owners of the animals claimed.

The most substantial hedges were formidable topographical features, containing many mature trees, which might be felled, pollarded, and ‘shredded’ for their branches, for which the lord’s licence was often required. In about 1500 Thomas Waring, a tenant of John Archer in Tanworth-in-Arden, listed the most valuable trees in woods and hedgerows on the Archer estate. ³⁴ In one hedge he saw twenty-eight great oaks, eleven ashes, and aspens. The hedge also contained coppiced underwood such as hazel. Thick growths of bushes were common elements in hedges throughout the region, which attracted those in pursuit of firewood. Interspersed along the hedge between the trees and bushes, according to illustrations made in the early modern period, were short stretches of fencing, so the hedge might contain ‘dead hedge’ in addition to the living vegetation. Stone walls surrounded fields in the Cotswolds, at Tormarton in 1495 for example, but even on stone-rich uplands hedges, not walls, predominated. At Kingscote high up above the Stroud valley in 1435 hedges were to be ‘pleshed’ and at Hawkesbury in the same year also on the hills, and at Stoke Giffard on lower ground, hedges were ‘plaited’ or ‘woven’. ³⁵ The vocabulary is that of living hedges being laid by cutting partly through upright stems of bushes and small trees (pleaching), and bending them to create a dense intertwined barrier, as used to be standard practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such hedges with closely packed and preferably thorny branches would present straying animals with an impenetrable obstacle. Lords’ officials sent carts to woods to dig hedging plants, no doubt collecting a number of species, though with a preference for hawthorn and blackthorn. Peasants must have done the same. Hawthorn branches were much in demand for dead hedging, but fencing was regarded (at Hawkesbury in 1468) as inferior to live plants. ³⁶

So far, the contentious enclosures have been shown to have arisen from closes being hedged or set apart one at a time. ‘Enclosure by agreement’, by which hundreds of acres of land might be simultaneously divided into a dozen or more closes, required careful negotiation and raised inevitable opposition from those who lost access to the land taken into closes. Ingelstone, a hamlet of Hawkesbury (Gloucestershire) had its fields enclosed in 1467–8. ³⁷ The lord’s steward implemented the agreement ‘by the assent and consent of all of the tenants’. He delegated to six tenants the task of ‘separating and dividing all of the fields between the tenants there’ by Michaelmas, the beginning of the agricultural year. It was agreed that the new fences should be made well and competently by Lady Day (25 March), a rather late date. The arrangements for the enclosure, while implying unity among the cultivators, hints at difficulties because first choice of one of the new closes was given to Richard Heynes, perhaps to placate a dissenter. The well-documented enclosure of the land of the sixteen ‘halfyardland men’ at Sambourn (Warwickshire) at some time before 1477 created a new set of fields containing about 240 acres. ³⁸ Again not everyone was on board, as Thomas Beche attempted to pasture his cattle on the enclosed land, presumably thereby claiming his common right. In 1478 the sixteen were ordered that they ‘should have all the land within the field called halfyard grownde several at all times of year’, and they were reminded to repair hedges to keep cattle out. In a separate dispute ‘great discord’ arose over the allocation of five selions which had been left outside the enclosures when Thomas Roper one of the sixteen claimed two of them. The other fifteen were told to enquire ‘to which part they belong’. The course of enclosure was evidently not running smoothly, and we understand the reluctance of villagers to embark on such complex schemes.

The tenants with closes gained the option of cropping in the fallow year and increasing the frequency of crops. Alternatively, the close could be converted to long-term or permanent pasture, which was the case with a Chaddesley Corbett tenant who received approval for building a sheepcote on enclosed land held in severalty called Scruggesfeldes. ³⁹ Most of the other changes in land management that we have seen in the period 1350–1540, such as changes in rotation and the introduction of leys, were designed to shift the balance from arable to pasture.

Peasant communities are sometimes idealized, and are portrayed as showing wisdom and cohesion. We have seen that almost all of the adaptations and reforms were accompanied by conflict. These disagreements did not result in much violence, though tempers might have flared when animals found in the wrong place were impounded and then freed by their owner in an act of ‘poundbreach’. In other situations, the various mechanism for resolving conflict peaceably seem to have worked.

Modern commentators have identified a drift to an apocalyptic culmination of the endless compromises of peasant farming. One view is that the commons were doomed to a tragic end, as individual ambition was incompatible with the sharing of resources. The land would be ruined by over grazing, and the commons were travelling on a one-way street from community co-operation to individual ownership. This was not the case, and the commons, though mired in controversy, served a vital purpose. They were managed through various agencies, from informal groups of peasants, to village meetings, manor courts, and higher authorities, all of which maintained rules inefficiently but well enough to keep the common functioning for the benefit of its users. ⁴⁰ Land was being enclosed gradually from the twelfth century (and before) until c.1500 when a fifth of the land in the champion and a third in the woodlands in the west midlands lay in closes. Even by 1640 in England as a whole enclosure had captured less than half (47 per cent), of the land. ⁴¹

Crops and their use

The tithe records of twenty-nine parishes provide a useful guide to peasant crops. Rectors of parish churches were entitled to a tenth of all produce, which included hay, wool, lambs, hens’ eggs, and garden produce, but the largest item was the tenth part of the field crops, of grain and legumes. In many cases the tithe was collected, not by a clergyman in charge of the parish, but by a monastery that had appropriated the rectory. Some tithe totals included crops on the lord’s demesne, but peasant output made up the majority. In practice the demesne crops were often separated from the main tithe collection, in which case the tithes are a very good guide to the types of grain and legumes grown by peasants.

The sample of documented parishes gives an overview of the region as they represent different landscapes and environments. They stretch in date from the end of the thirteenth century to the late fifteenth, with a bias towards the later part of the period because Worcester Cathedral Priory’s records relate to fourteen parishes in the fifteenth century ⁴² (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 Crops from tithe receipts, mainly Worcestershire. The map shows the parishes with evidence; the pie charts the proportions of crops. The Worcester Priory parishes are documented in the fifteenth century, the others in the early fourteenth (sources: notes 42, 44).

Peasants in the champion districts of Worcestershire and Warwickshire mainly depended on wheat as their winter corn, with rye and maslin, a mixture of wheat and rye, in some Avon valley parishes. In the spring the champion peasants planted drage (barley and oats mixed) and pulse (peas and beans). In addition to the ten champion parishes to which this generalization applies, in Gloucestershire three Vale of Berkeley parishes could be added, though they grew barley, not drage. Bishop’s Cleeve could be included, because although the village itself lay on the edge of the Cotswolds, most of its crops were planted on low lying clay soils. Drage was an especially preferred crop among champion peasants, often accounting for a half of the total. The cultivators of Long Itchington (Warwickshire) another champion parish, grew much drage, but oats were prominent as well as pulse. ⁴³

Peasant crops were more varied in the woodlands. In western Worcestershire, wheat was preferred, accounting for a third to a half of the total, with varying amounts of barley, drage, oats, and pulse. At Castle Morton a fifth of the output consisted of peas and beans. In the north of the county wheat, rye, or maslin made about a half, a much higher proportion of winter-sown crops than was the case in the champion parishes. The spring sown crops sometimes included drage, but oats were grown in quantity, with very little pulse. The cultivators of King’s Norton on the high, cold, and wet plateau of north-east Worcestershire in c. 1300 produced an unusually high proportion, 64 per cent, of oats. ⁴⁴

What do these tell us about the strategies of peasant production? They made a realistic assessment of the soils and environment, by growing rye and maslin on the sands and gravels of the river valleys, and at Wolverley. Oats were suited to the cold clays of King’s Norton. The balance of peasants’ crops differed from those of their lords although they were cultivating very similar adjacent land. At Hallow in the fifteenth century the lord favoured rye, and grew very little wheat, while the peasants consistently planted more wheat than rye, perhaps because of their preference for wheat bread. In the spring at Hallow the lord preferred to plant drage and oats, while the peasants grew more pulse. One motive for peasants including much pulse in their rotations could have been to benefit the next grain crop from extra nitrogen in the soil, so the rotation at Adlestrop was specified to have the wheat crop following pulse. Peasants also fed their livestock with pulses. On the seven Worcester Priory manors in the Worcestershire woodlands, the cultivators increased the proportion of winter-sown crops (wheat, rye, and maslin), from 45 per cent at the beginning of the fifteenth century to 54 per cent in 1416–1462. They were supplying their own households with corn for bread, and seeking better returns in the market. At Hallow both the demesne and the peasants increased their pulse planting in 1416, which might have been in response to a short-term rise in the price of pulses.

Before deciding if subsistence or the market had most influence on peasant production, it might help to look at individuals. The grain and legumes collected as tithes represented an aggregate of many individual holdings, all of whom behaved differently, as can be seen by examining the crops harvested after peasants left their holdings, fled after committing a felony, or died, leaving the lord to harvest the crops. Occasionally an individual followed the cropping pattern of his neighbours precisely, such as Walter Longeman of Cleeve Prior in 1374, who planted 2 acres of wheat, 2 acres of drage, and 2 acres of pulse: the tithes of Cleeve typically consisted of one-third of each of those crops. ⁴⁵ Others had made decisions radically different from their neighbours, such as a tenant of Sedgeberrow in 1417 whose combination of crops included 47 per cent of pulse; pulse accounted for one-third of the tithes of his parish. At Teddington a few years earlier a tenant specialized in drage (46 per cent of the total), compared with 35 per cent of drage in the tithe corn. ⁴⁶ A clue to interpreting the thinking of individuals can be found in the case of Richard Charlet of Cleeve Prior, who took on lease the parson’s glebe, which was not a peasant holding, but at 50 acres (of which 25 acres would have been sown each year) was much the same size as a number of the larger holdings in Cleeve of the mid-fifteenth century. Charlet’s choice of crops in 1456 may well have been designed to satisfy the needs of his household, with 46 per cent of the sown area being planted with wheat for making bread, 30 per cent with drage for brewing, 22 per cent with pulse as an ingredient in pottage, but mostly for feeding livestock. The total of grain and legumes that would have been harvested exceeded a normal family’s consumption needs, so Charlet would have been able to sell about 7 quarters of wheat and 2 quarters of pulse. Two years later Charlet’s priorities had changed totally: 54 per cent of his crops were drage, with 33 per cent of pulse and 13 per cent of wheat. He had evidently decided to grow a large amount of drage with marketing in mind: this relatively rapid change suggests a flexibility in decision-making. ⁴⁷ Drage was often malted and brewed, and ale consumption was rising.

If Charlet specialized in order to cater for the market, this must explain some of the other unbalanced range of crops grown by individuals, which have already been cited. The woodland parishes expanded their production of winter-sown cereals, including rye, because they could see increased demand from towns along the Severn valley such as Worcester, and from long-distance trade on the river. Rye was eaten in the city of Worcester in the sixteenth century, especially by the less affluent, and in the same period rye figures prominently among the grains kept by householders for family consumption in Coventry. ⁴⁸ Oats were not much eaten by humans, apart from oatmeal as an ingredient in pottage, but they did have an importance in household consumption as a brewing corn in the absence of barley and drage. Oats were fed both to horses and pigs, and were traded into regions (such as the champion) where they were not much grown. Oats were required in towns for the many horses used for riding and transport.

Archaeological finds of carbonized cereals inform us about their consumption, and confirm the importance of wheat. Grain was charred by accident when it was being dried before being ground for flour, and is sometimes found near the hearth. The grain preserved in this way indicates not just the crops that were grown, but also those that were eaten. On every site, wheat grains were much more plentiful than any other: at Bishop’s Cleeve 1,064 wheat grains compare with 135 grains of barley and 106 of oats. A rural site near Moreton-in-Marsh, also in north Gloucestershire, with much wheat (4,293 grains) also had a significant amount of rye (1,330 grains) together with 527 of barley, and 699 of oats, and a few remnants of peas and beans. Quantities of burnt wheat grains are reported from Burton Dassett, Goldicote, Pinbury, and the other excavated medieval rural sites. ⁴⁹

Pulse and oats were fed to animals ‘in straw’, meaning that the livestock were given peas in their haulm, and sheaves of oats. Straw left after threshing had many functions in the household and on the holding. It provided fodder, litter (for animals), bedding (for people), fuel, and building material. Each type of straw had its own uses: for example, rye straw was valued for thatching, and oat straw was fed to horses and cattle, but it seems unlikely that crops were selected on the basis of these secondary uses.

Medieval peasant households put some effort into their gardens and orchards, and spent time gathering in woods and wastes. The region had a strong reputation for its fruitfulness: in the twelfth century William of Malmesbury, in a passage which belongs to a genre of writing about ‘ideal places’ extolled the virtues of the Vale of Gloucester, telling his readers that ‘even the most bored slacker’ would be enthused by the fertility of the crops. ⁵⁰ He singled out for praise the fruit trees lining the roads. The scale of gardening can be judged by the size of the spaces allotted for it, which could be very small: one at Henbury–in-the-Salt-Marsh in 1376–7 measured 21 feet by 20 feet (7m by 6m), though larger spaces suitable for gardens can be seen behind abandoned houses on village sites, up to 30m by 50m. The excavators of Burton Dassett Southend identified some areas as likely gardens; for example, a space 20m wide and at least 10m long in tenement A. In some places tenants could rent a separate garden which was not part of the house plot, like two parcels of Plumtrelond at Bromsberrow (Gloucestershire). ⁵¹

Although the gardens occupied limited space, they were potentially productive through intensive inputs of labour (especially from women), and manure. The total output of apples at Bourton-on-the-Hill (Gloucestershire), a village with about seventy households, in 1295–6 is shown to have attained 255 bushels. ⁵² The crops have left traces in the botanical evidence from rural excavations, such as apple pips and plum stones. Urban sites are relevant to this enquiry because much of the garden produce is likely to have originated in the countryside and brought into the town for sale. A fifteenth-century latrine at Worcester contained traces of mustard, damson, cherry, pear, apple, gooseberry, fennel, and cabbage. ⁵³ The documents which make most frequent reference to rural gardens are the trespass actions brought to the manor court by tenants whose gardens had been invaded by animals, which might refer to vegetables or herbs being damaged. Cabbages, leeks, and onions were commonly grown, together with such trees as apple, pear, plum, and walnut. Tithe to be collected at Beckford (Worcestershire) in 1487–8 included ‘onions and all sorts of herbs’, and apples, pears, and crabs, meaning crab apples. ⁵⁴

Tenants in retirement were usually promised specific quantities of cereals, but occasionally access to a garden was mentioned, and more specifically fruit from apple and pear trees. An agreement at Elmley Castle in 1470 allowed William Sparke a warden pear tree, and half of the fruit from the pear genet tree that grew in the garden of the house that he was surrendering, showing his regard for these varieties. ⁵⁵ Peasants grew hemp and flax sometimes in gardens, or in small temporary plots carved out of the common pasture. The fibres could have brought in considerable sums of money, judging from tithe valuation at Monks Kirby in 1411 as high as 13s, indicating that the crop was worth more than £6 ⁵⁶ (see ‘Industry within peasant society’ in Chapter 9).

Edible plants could be gathered in woods and wastes, and while these sources of free food were especially important for the village poor, they could also add to the diet of the better-off. From rural excavations come evidence for hazelnuts, sloes, blackberries, and elderberries, while urban finds (with likely rural origins) include wild strawberries. The documents focus on the vegetation collected, often because excessive quantities were taken, or some other nuisance caused, including bracken, broom, furze, gorse, and thorns, to be used as litter, fuel, and hedging material, and rushes for strewing. As was the case with the more plentiful and essential field crops of grain and legumes, the purpose of horticulture and gathering was partly, indeed mostly, to satisfy the needs of the household, but some of the produce was sold, hence the archaeological evidence from towns for plants such as bracken, heather and gorse, and complaints in the manor court that rushes, thorns, and furze were being over-exploited for commercial gain (see ‘Poverty and industry’ in Chapter 9).

Arable husbandry

Peasants expressed views on good and bad husbandry when in the fourteenth century the jurors commented in the manor court on the deficiencies of lords’ officials (especially reeves and bailiffs) and specialist employees such as shepherds. The criticisms were encouraged by the estate administrators, following a well-established medieval technique for checking on the efficiency and honesty of officials. Reeves also had an occasional opportunity to explain their management, for example, in dialogues with auditors. The comments of these ordinary country people who were temporarily occupying office as jurors and reeves bring us near to hearing the voices of peasants, though their views were filtered on being entered into official records.

The criticisms included allegations of corruption, such as a reeve diverting implements and labour from the demesne to work on his own holding. ⁵⁷ Here the comments will focus on husbandry methods and practices presumed to be based on the peasants’ own experiences. They were apparently applying to the demesne the standards of agriculture that they would ideally have practised on their own holdings. An obvious example was the maintenance of fencing to exclude livestock from the sown fields, and reeves sometimes failed to do this.

A repeated complaint concerned the lack of thorough cultivation of the demesne arable. A reeve would cut corners by omitting the headlands, the last part of the field to be ploughed. It was said that the ploughing of the fallow was neglected, and the second ploughing, the rebinatio, was not done. This could have reduced yields because repeated ploughing was a means of weed control. The ploughing might be carried out, but not the harrowing that broke up the clods and helped to create a seed bed. Manure might not be spread, or it was ‘not spread well’. A reeve justified extra expenditure to the auditors by claiming that he was following good practice by sowing beans by hand, which meant dibbling a hole to receive each seed. A thirteenth-century treatise on estate management from Gloucester Abbey calculated that twelve women could plant 3 acres with a quarter of beans in a day. ⁵⁸ One reeve hired labour to remove weed seeds from the grain intended for sowing, which was a good practice but led to extra expense.

Criticisms of inadequate demesne cultivation included a lack of weeding, sometimes because it was not done at all, but also because ‘it was not well weeded’. Reeves who did carry out weeding would find, perhaps because of earlier neglect, that the land was infested with thistles and removing them needed extra spending. The reeve of Weston-juxta-Cherrington (Warwickshire) complained of the growth of thistles soon after the Black Death, when labour to deal with them was scarce. The managers of the demesnes at Grimley and Wolverley in 1412 blamed a low yield of the rye crop on the growth of tares. ⁵⁹

The harvest was always a period of anxiety for cultivators. To save labour, scythes rather than sickles might be used, which reduced the yield because more grains might be spilled from the ears. Damage would be caused by animals entering the stubble field before all of the sheaves had been carried, and workers had to be closely supervised lest they steal corn. Once brought into the manorial curia (farmyard), the stored crops might not be well protected. Juries reported at Netherton (Worcestershire) that in 1389 the barn had defective walls and a poorly maintained roof, and at Blackwell in 1370 a stack of pulse had deteriorated because it was not adequately thatched. ⁶⁰

The failings of the reeves and bailiffs provide a useful commentary on husbandry practices, and the same problems were occasionally reported on peasant holdings. From litigation, reports of neglect of ploughing and building repair, and by-laws requiring better cultivation, a picture emerges of fencing in need of maintenance, failure to cultivate, particularly ploughing the fallow, neglect of manuring and non-repair of barns. Many of the criticisms of demesne husbandry were made in the late fourteenth century, when the demesne managers were having to cope with the shortage of labour. The difficulties of recruitment of the full-time demesne servants, such as ploughmen, carters, and shepherds emerged from reports to the courts that the demesne lacked at least one of these important workers for at least part of the year. The gaps must have been filled by hiring workers for short terms.

Peasant holdings cannot be regarded simply as smaller versions of the demesnes, as is apparent from their particular labour problems. They employed servants, but expected them to carry out a variety of tasks. There was not enough ploughing on a 30-acre holding to employ a specialist ploughman, and if a servant did the ploughing, he would be expected to turn his hand in season to ditching, threshing, haymaking, and harvesting. Much of the labour resource of the holding for field work consisted of odd days and weeks of working time gained from family members. The lords’ work force consisted mainly of adult males, while the peasants had to make the best use of youths, females of all ages, and the elderly. The lords’ workers were contracted to work for a year or half year, but peasant employment was more flexible—a servant might occasionally work for other villagers.

The peasants’ shepherd would be a specialist worker, and his duties were regarded as important enough for him to be exempted from the bedrip, the harvest service performed by the whole household. These shepherds are rarely mentioned as individuals, but a Shipston court for 1325 dealing with sheep invading the lord’s land, criticized ‘all of the shepherds of Shipston, except the shepherds of Hugh Baret, Juliana Jenecokes, and Robert Gerveys’. ⁶¹ This was at a time when many sheep flocks were no larger than sixty animals, so that employing a shepherd full-time seems a luxury, but the larger flocks of 200 to 300 sheep which later became more common would keep a worker fully occupied. After the epidemics labour problems might arise from a reduction in the number of children, and the absence of older children who found work or land elsewhere. Family pressure could be exerted on young people to stay at home and work, like those over fifteen years described as ‘son and servant’ in the 1381 poll tax (see ‘Character of family life’ in Chapter 5). Labour could be managed effectively in the family context. Weeding, for example, for which demesnes could not recruit and reward sufficient workers, was a relatively light task well-suited to children, women, and the elderly, and could be carried out efficiently by well-motivated workers with manual dexterity, and a willingness to bend down to the task. Cleaning the seed corn by removing weed seeds also benefited from attention to detail and patient endurance of tedium. Family labour would in theory be committed to the work because each worker would benefit, but to that self-interest should be added the moral pressure that could be exerted. A forceful head could remind other members of the household of the benefits of work. The amount of weeding done on a lord’s demesne has been calculated at one to two days per acre of crops, some dipping below one per acre. A peasant household with three workers (perhaps including a female and an adolescent) could surely find three working days per acre to deal with 15 sown acres? ⁶²

In conclusion, the quantity of work applied to peasant holdings and its quality suggests that peasant farming could be well supplied with labour, and did not need to monitor wage costs as did the demesne managers, partly because the holding was organized on different principles. However, the peasants’ traditional style of labour-intensive cultivation might have come under strain in the post-plague countryside.

Farming methods and techniques

How effective was peasant agricultural technique, in terms of implements, methods of maintaining or improving fertility, and crop storage? The equipment for farming is well represented in documents and from archaeological excavation and this discussion is based on 383 documentary references to relevant objects, and about 250 finds from excavations. Tools and implements are mentioned in various circumstances, such as lists of the principal goods which tenants were supposed to keep in their houses during a tenancy, or inventories made when a tenant left a holding. But they also feature as heriots, stolen property, loans that had not been returned, and weapons. The heavier pieces of equipment account for a high proportion of the total, around 200 items. These were wains, carts, ploughs, and harrows, together with yokes for oxen, collars for horses, harness, ropes, iron chains, and ox goads. The plough, the wooden implement, was valued separately at a few pence, while the iron share and coulter, sizeable pieces of metal, were worth 2s. A fully operational plough with its iron-bound ‘foot’ (in the west midlands it had no wheels) ⁶³ and all the means of harnessing the oxen would be worth a few shillings, some way behind a wain or cart, which was often valued at 10s. The most expensive vehicles were those with wheels fitted with iron tyres, but of the fifty carts and wains recorded in the west midland documents only fourteen were said to have had wheels of this type. The iron tyres gave the wheels an extended life, and were of particular value for running on hard roads, on journeys to market, for example. Most peasant carts and wains were intended to travel across fields, or on tracks without metalled surfaces, and their loads were sheaves, corn, manure, and wood fuel being transported around the scattered parcels of the holding, or back to the house and buildings.

Ploughs were pulled by oxen, as were wains. After 1340 horse-drawn carts greatly outnumber wains, in the same way that there were more horse harrows than ox harrows. The advance of horse hauling was a comparatively late development. Before 1200 peasants used quite large and heavy ox-drawn vehicles, for which the Latin terms were plaustrum and carrus, but by the late thirteenth century, even in this conservative region, the technology was changing. At Tredington (Warwickshire) tenants were expected to carry fuel for the lord’s hearth in a plaustrum in c.1170, but in a cart (carecta) by 1299. ⁶⁴ A horse-drawn vehicle needed a smaller number of animals, and was faster and lighter than a wain, but it carried a smaller load. Horse hauling had increased in the later Middle Ages, and there were more riding horses, but the plough was even in 1500 still pulled by oxen, though there are hints of some mixed teams.

The most frequently mentioned hand tools were forks, either of wood or of iron, with two tines or three, and were mostly intended for moving sheaves or manure. Peasant axes appear often in the records, mainly because on some manors the woodward by custom seized the offenders’ axes in response to illicit tree felling or branch lopping. The other tools were used in the successive processes of cultivation: the seedlip from which seed corn was broadcast; hoes and weeding hooks; sickles for cutting corn, wielded by both women and men, forks for pitching sheaves on to carts, and then on to stacks at the barn; ladders and ropes for making and securing stacks, both in the barn and in the yard, flails and winnowing fans, with sieves and riddles used in threshing, and bushel measures and sacks for preparing the grain for sale. A hair cloth would enable grain to be dried over a low fire, or for malting.

For tasks away from the arable fields, scythes cut hay (though sometimes they were used in the grain harvest), and forks had a role in the hay field. An iron rake is mentioned once, suggesting that they were usually made cheaply of wood. Hand tools for digging, mattocks, shovels, and spades, were perhaps most often used in digging ditches along the hedges around the fields, but also for the ‘water furrows’, for drainage in the fields. Hand digging may have supplemented ploughing in awkward corners or where the oxen trampled the earth when manoeuvring at the end of the strips. Mattocks broke clods which resisted harrowing. Hedges were managed with the aid of axes and billhooks. Sheep shearing was the only task in livestock rearing which required a specific tool, though shears also had domestic uses.

The archaeological finds sometimes coincide with the documentary evidence; for example, sickle and scythe blades are found, though the latter are represented only by fragments. Such large iron tools were too valuable to be discarded, but were recycled by the smith. The trade in scrap and the frequent reworking of worn-out implements explains the absence from archaeological sites of plough shares, coulters, and iron tyres from carts. The smaller fittings from ploughs and carts, often too incomplete and badly corroded to be easily identified, probably feature among the various rings, chain links, staples, and spikes scattered around archaeological sites. Some items are not included in the documents. The number of horseshoes, with seventy-nine from the extensive excavations at Burton Dassett Southend, nine from Upton, nine from Goldicote, three from Pinbury, and as many as thirteen from the poor site at Coton suggests a high level of horse use. ⁶⁵ Weeding tools are rather sparsely recorded in the documents but blades of hoes, weeding hooks, and spuds, all consisting of sharp iron heads once mounted on long wooden hafts, are routine finds in excavations. They were wielded with precision, with each weed removed individually so as not to disturb the corn, but this method took time.

Numerous finds on settlement sites are hones or whetstones, with eighty-eight from Burton Dassett Southend and seventeen at Upton, of which the documents make no mention. They were needed to sharpen the many blades, including knives, shears, sickles, scythes, and axes. They were employed inside the house, indicated by grooves on them for sharpening needles and pins, but their main use would have been in the fields, and they were kept readily available, with a hole drilled for suspension. They were made of specialist stone, including one type that was imported from Norway. Larger blades, especially those of scythes, could be sharpened (at Upton and Pinbury) with a rotary grindstone.

The archaeological finds reflect social inequalities, which means that metal small finds are much more numerous at sites such as Burton Dassett and Upton, than at the poor hamlet of cottagers at Coton. The documents enable more precise comparisons, and in particular they show that yardlanders and half-yardlanders were equipped with ploughs and carts (or wains), and these implements were not included in the inventories of those with smaller holdings. A quarter-yardlander in 1402 at Sedgeberrow (Worcestershire) owned a cart and a harrow, but that stands out as an anomaly. ⁶⁶ From the small sample of cottagers and smallholders for whom we have lists of possessions it has been suggested that their hand tools may have been used to cultivate their holdings. A striking example was Richard Sclatter of Elmley Castle, an artisan, who owned a spade and a shovel when his goods were recorded in 1457. ⁶⁷ Perhaps the smallholders dug their land by hand and foot, and it has even been suggested that they produced a more thorough result than that achieved by ploughing. However, spades were not standard possessions among the cottars, but on the contrary were as likely to be owned by the half-yardlanders and yardlanders, and seem to have supplemented the ploughs rather than providing an alternative to them. While a very small holding of an acre or two could have been dug in reasonable time, the tenants who lacked ploughs in the west midlands included quarter-yardlanders with 7 or 8 acres which would have needed many days’ work. This was especially arduous work for cultivators with a clumsy wooden spade with a small iron shoe, very different from its efficient modern steel successor. ⁶⁸ The cultivator’s time was limited because, like Richard Sclatter (who roofed buildings with stone slates) they had other paid work to supplement the income from their land.

Smallholders arranged for their land to be ploughed by their better-off neighbours. Those who owned ploughs had spare ploughing capacity. A yardlander in a two-field village would plough 7 or 8 acres in the October to December winter ploughing season, which if he could manage a normal half acre per day would take fifteen or sixteen days. He would be occupied on other days with such tasks as harrowing and sowing, but he would have days when he could transfer his plough and labour on to the land of other tenants. It was a common practice, which is recorded when the arrangement went wrong and a plea of broken contract was pursued through the manor court. Thomas Oweyn of Bockleton (Worcestershire) in 1310 had agreed with Walter de Middelton and John Ragun that they should plough 2 acres, but they did not. At Longdon in the same county in 1378 John Martyn should have ploughed as agreed the land of Alice Notte for two days, and in 1379 William Payn of Alveston (Warwickshire) made a contract for John West to plough 3 acres, but he failed to do so. The Halesowen records between 1270 and 1349 contain fifteen cases in which oxen were hired, thirty-two hirings of ploughs, harrows, and carts, and fifty-seven references to contracts to carry out agricultural tasks, including ploughing and harrowing. ⁶⁹ A will inventory of 1495 includes 21s owed by four people for ‘tilling’, which refers to a plough owner hiring his implement and labour to neighbours as a source of profit. ⁷⁰

The quarter-yardlanders rarely owned a plough, but are found with oxen, revealed when a heriot was taken. If they could contribute an ox or two to the full eight ox team, and presumably their own labour, their land could be worked as a joint operation. Sharing ploughing equipment and pooling beasts to make up a team were widespread practices in medieval England, but are only occasionally documented (see ‘Cattle’ in Chapter 7). Tenants who did specialist tasks on the demesne, acting as carters or shepherds, who lacked draft animals, were allowed the privilege of the Saturday plough, that is the use of the demesne plough on one day per week. ⁷¹

Ploughing and harrowing created a seed bed and controlled weeds. Documentary sources are not specific about weeds, though thistles and tares were mentioned. Botanical evidence for a wide range of species has come from excavated medieval rural settlements. The presence of weeds in the growing corn is evident from charred seeds which are found mingled with carbonized cereal grains. The species which have left traces at Burton Dassett Southend included corn buttercup, corn cockle, stinking mayweed, and bristly ox tongue, though some of these may have been growing in gardens or on waste ground. The largest plants which would cause problems for the corn crop are the dock, nettle, and plantain found at Coton, and thistle and chickweed at Goldicote. Dock was also present at Bishop’s Cleeve, together with knot grass and stinking chamomile. ⁷²

Manuring the cultivated land was a normal part of the peasant’s agricultural routine. Every household kept at least one manure heap, and at Burton Dassett Southend the excavators recognized both concentrated deposits of domestic debris, and dung heaps consisting mainly of organic material. ⁷³ Better-off peasants had dung carts and dung wains for carrying manure, which was collected and spread with dung forks. Manure was a marketable commodity. A legal dispute in 1426 in the borough court of Alcester between two tenants from the nearby village of Sambourn concerned a sum of 7s, which was said to be owed pro fimo (for manure). ⁷⁴ Leasehold requirements that land be manured by the tenant could result in litigation if the obligation was neglected. ⁷⁵ Tenants were expected to use manure within the manor or village territory, leading to a by-law at Stoke Gifford in 1423 that no tenant should take manure out of the lordship. The lord presumably did not want a holding to deteriorate in fertility and therefore value, leading to an objection in 1389 when a Teddington (Gloucestershire) tenant took manure to spread on his holding at nearby Beckford. ⁷⁶

Manuring practices are reflected in pottery and other artefacts scattered over the surface of modern fields and collected in programmes of archaeological fieldwork. Domestic rubbish, including broken pottery, was spread with manure on the fields, and potsherds were left as an enduring record of the process. A systematic map of the distribution of sherds recovered by field walking allows us to reconstruct the journeys to the medieval fields made by the peasants’ dung carts. A complete survey of the ploughed fields of Admington (Warwickshire) shows very marked differences across the township, with notable concentrations of potsherds immediately to the west of the settlement, but also in fields up to half a mile to the north. Similar clusters of sherds have been found to the north of the village of Compton Verney, another nucleated village in the same county ⁷⁷ (Figures 6.1). By contrast, other fields belonging to these villages have produced very thin distributions of pottery, or none at all. These were certainly cultivated, as they are (or were recently) covered in ridge and furrow, but were either manured ‘by the fold’ (that is by livestock pastured on the stubble and fallow) rather than ‘by the cart’’, so that manuring left no visible trace, or the land belonged to the lord’s demesne, which collected and spread its manure without the addition of domestic rubbish. Furlongs in the open field were probably selected to receive the peasants’ carted manure because they had better soils, and would repay the effort, even if this involved a longer cart journey. In other regions, the folding of sheep on the arable was closely regulated in order to maximize deposit of manure on the demesne, but in our region peasants’ flocks were not apparently confined at night on the lords’ land.

In areas of dispersed settlement, as with nucleated villages, there are similar signs of the selection of particular fields for special treatment. At Pendock (Worcestershire) a great deal of pottery, and therefore manure, was deposited on the largest common field, West Field, but also on land called ‘the crofts’, where the land was enclosed. Both areas lay near to hamlets (Figure 2.3). The common fields of Hanbury, however, do not seem to have received so much carted manure, and the densest scatters have been found at Brook End, where much of the land was enclosed, partly as a result of thirteenth-century assarting. ⁷⁸ One of the advantages of holding land ‘in severalty’ was the opportunity to spread manure on land controlled completely by the tenant.

The peasant manure heap had its own characteristics. Animal housing, such as a byre, sheepcote, or pigsty, provided a concentrated trampled manure mingled with straw. However peasant animals were often kept in yards or paddocks, and their droppings would have to be collected. The domestic waste, which would have been added may have included human ordure, though latrines and cesspits appear irregularly in documents or excavations. Faeces may have been deposited in wooden vessels and tipped on to the general manure heap. A tantalizing phrase ‘domestic manure’ described the heap causing a nuisance on the king’s highway outside the door of Thomas Clerk of Willoughby (Warwickshire) in 1492. ⁷⁹

Peasants were more likely than the managers of the demesne to treat their land with marl. This calcareous subsoil, dug out of deep pits and carted for spreading, improved the texture and chemical properties of the soil in which crops were planted. Demesnes were marled, but not on a sufficient scale to explain the many marlpits in documents. They were regarded as commonplace landmarks when defining boundaries, or they occasionally appear as assets, like the share in a marlle pytte in a field called Swannes pytte that was leased by John Hoblay of Coleshill in 1414. Very large numbers of water-filled marl pits now dot the countryside. Though undateable, the twelve pits at Compton Verney are likely to belong to the medieval period. ⁸⁰ Spreading marl was valued so highly that pits were dug to dangerous depths leading to the death of Robert de Upton in a pit at Kempsey (Worcestershire) ‘when the earth fell on him’, recorded in 1275. ⁸¹ Peasants could choose times to extract and spread marl when the round of seasonal agricultural tasks allowed. Lords had to pay workers, or divert labour services to the task, which made them less likely to undertake marling on a large scale.

Once the fields had been prepared by repeated ploughing, harrowing, clod breaking, manuring, and marling, the seed to be sown had to be selected. This often came from the previous year’s harvest, but cultivators could change seed by purchase or exchange. Thirteenth-century estate managers believed that sowing seed from another manor could improve yields, but do not mention acquiring different varieties of seed. The written sources scarcely mention types: ‘wheat’ was a sufficient description, but botanists can identify distinct species and varieties. At Bascote in Warwickshire analysis of surviving chaff suggests a preponderance of free-threshing wheat, with some bread wheat and rivet wheat. At Burton Dassett both rivet wheat and bread wheat had been planted, and they are also found at Moreton-in-Marsh. ⁸² Each type had advantages and disadvantages, such as rivet wheat’s better performance on clay soils, while its spiky ears discouraged birds, and it had some resistance to disease. It needed a long growing season, and it was not always best-suited to bread making. Bread wheat was, as its name implied, good for baking, but did not perform well in poorer soils. Individual peasants could find the best mix of seed for their circumstances by empirical observation, though neighbours could have compared experiences and a collective wisdom would have emerged. Barley came in different varieties, but not on west midland sites. The peasants’ corn was apparently not inferior in quality to that grown on the demesne, as occasionally the administrators of the Worcester Cathedral Priory estate sowed their demesne with grain collected as tithe, so deriving their seed from peasant crops.

Seed once planted could be threatened by birds, such as the members of the crow family identified among the bones excavated at Burton Dassett Southend. Hundreds of crows, rooks, and choughs were killed in early sixteenth-century Worcestershire for the Prior of Worcester, and the same methods (with nets) could have been used by peasants, who had strong motives to limit crop damage. ⁸³ As the corn grew it was weeded, and then harvested, a lengthy process that seems to have been hastened by the adoption by the fifteenth century, if not earlier, of the scythe as a supplement to the prevalent sickle. The harvesters would carry the sheaves back to the settlement, which given the field arrangements especially in a champion landscape, might involve a journey of a mile or more. In bad weather some urgency was desirable. Tenants of larger holdings were at an advantage in owning carts, while quarter- yardlanders and smallholders may have borrowed or hired carts, or loaded sheaves onto packhorses.

A major concern, once the sheaves had been carried, was their secure storage until threshing could be completed. Most peasants, even many smallholders, built and maintained a barn. In the documents different Latin words, grangia and horreum, were applied, but the terms seem to have been synonyms. When orders were made for building repairs from the 1350s a high proportion of the farm buildings mentioned were barns. The size of the building to be repaired or rebuilt was commonly specified as three bays, so about 15m by 5m. They matched dwelling houses in both size and structure, as they were commonly built with stone foundations and timber frames including crucks. At least forty barns built with crucks survive in the west midland. They include buildings that once formed part of manorial establishments, monastic granges, or rectory farms, but a number stood next to peasant houses. A four-bay cruck-built barn once attached to a peasant holding at Pendock (Worcestershire) survived in use until the end of the twentieth century. ⁸⁴ Such survivals tell us something about the durability of the original construction.

Excavations on village sites include some buildings likely to have been barns. Building A5 at Burton Dassett Southend, dated to the fifteenth century, measured 14.5 m by 4.5 m, and could have been of either three or four bays. It had partially surviving stone foundations and had been timber framed; its wide doors confirm its identification as a barn. Likely barns were found on another five tenements at Burton Dassett Southend ⁸⁵ (Figure 6.3). A thirteenth-century Gloucester Abbey treatise gives a formula for calculating the volume of stacked sheaves. If this applied to the Burton Dassett Southend barns, they can each be shown to have been capable of storing the crops of a yardland holding. ⁸⁶ As long as the thatched roofs of barns were maintained (which was not always the case) the heaps of sheaves within them would be kept dry, but rats and mice could not have been excluded by stone foundations, timber-framed walls, and wattle and daub panels. Storage buildings could be constructed on staddle stones, that is, on stone pillars with cover stones resembling large mushrooms. These raised the floor a half metre or so above the ground and would deter the most persistent rat, and also protect the crops from damp. A number of buildings called helms and at least one barn were built on staddle stones on peasant holdings at Bisley (Gloucestershire) in the late fourteenth century, but are not recorded in any other village. ⁸⁷ Bisley’s innovation was not eccentric or a dead end, as it must have contributed to food security, and in modern times buildings on staddle stones became commonplace in the region.

Figure 6.3 Peasant barns, Burton Dassett Southend. An early fifteenth-century timber building was replaced by one with stone foundations in the late fifteenth century. Both were of two bays (source: note 85).

A granary at Burton Dassett Southend protected its contents by means of a storage space above ground level. It was originally constructed in the fourteenth century as a single storey stone-walled building 7m by 5m, but was later enlarged and given an upper storey reached by an external stair. It had a capacity to hold 550 bushels of grain, which suggests that it was built for a cornmonger based in this semi-urban settlement. Peasants, even yardlanders, would sell less than a hundred bushels of grain, and would thresh their crops through the year, consuming and selling as they did so, and they had no need of a substantial granary. ⁸⁸

The protection of crops was the main function of peasant barns, but they were multi-functional structures. A ‘little hay barn’ at Ombersley shows that not just arable crops were stored. Barns housed livestock like the thirty sheep at Shirehampton (Gloucestershire) belonging in 1483 to an elderly couple who had access to part of a barn. They could have sheltered their small flock under cover in winter and in bad weather. Valuable implements such as carts may have been kept in the barn when a tenant had no cart shed. The mixed use of barns might explain why peasants stacked crops in the yard, like the pulse and hay (in stacks damaged by cattle) at Tibberton (Worcestershire) in 1389. ⁸⁹

Conclusion on husbandry and techniques

The changes made by peasants in field organization, their practices in husbandry, and their application of both old and new techniques could have been rewarded by increases in output. We do not have numerous measurements for peasant holdings of the amount of grain produced from an acre, or the ratio between seed sown and grain harvested. Manorial accounts enable us to generalize that on lords’ demesnes between 1270 and 1450 harvesters usually gathered in between 8 and 15 bushels per acre, and that grain and legumes yielded between two and five times the seed planted. These figures do not encourage us to have very high expectations for peasant productivity in the west midlands, because the demesnes performed less well than those in other parts of England, especially in the east, and yields were inferior to those found across the North Sea on the near continent. ⁹⁰

For comparative figures from peasant holdings, we can only clutch at isolated examples, such as the 7 bushels per acre harvested by the lord of Bourton-on-the-Hill in 1349 from the holdings of tenants who had died in the Black Death. A rather better performance, 9.8 bushels per acre, came from the holding of Walter Shayl of Hatton-on-Avon, whose crops were gathered by his lord after he left the manor. The land of John Kent at Stivichall (Warwickshire) in 1481 produced 11 ½ bushels per acre. ⁹¹ All were special cases, as 1349 was an untypical year, Hatton-on-Avon was a village in terminal decline, and the peasants of Stivichall may have been especially stimulated by the influence of nearby Coventry. The peasants’ crop yields were not completely different from those of the demesne, but inferior in the case of both Bourton and Hatton where direct comparison can be made.

An indirect indication of the potential performance of peasant arable farming can be made by examining stocking densities. These can be calculated from the arable acreage of a holding and the number of animals, to arrive at an index, suggesting the amount of manure available. The figures have been calculated for demesnes by assigning an index number to various types of livestock, with adult cattle rated at 1.2, horses at 1, and sheep and pigs at 0.1. Demesnes throughout England in 1250–1349 provide average densities of between 41 and 59 per 100 acres (the acreage for grain only, excluding legumes), and between 59 and 92 in 1350–1449, the higher figures reflecting the rising importance of the pastoral dimension in lords’ agriculture. ⁹²

Figures can be calculated for four west midland peasant holdings, dating from 1290 to 1447. The ratios relate to the whole arable acreage of the holdings, including both legumes and grain. The late thirteenth-century example (from Pinbury in Gloucestershire) gives a figure of 68, and three fifteenth-century cases 24, 69, and 193. ⁹³ Such widely scattered results from a tiny sample would not enable the conclusion to be drawn that peasant holdings should have benefited from a relative plenty of manure. The assumption of a direct connection between livestock and cultivation must be doubted, as the peasants’ animals deposited much of their manure over the fallow field and common pasture, so peasants gained from it in a general way, but there were limited opportunities for concentrating dung on particular strips and crofts. The stints which limited the numbers of animals that could be kept on the commons by a yardlander and are recorded for a number of villages between 1400 and 1540, can be used to calculate a model stocking density of at least 80, which is higher than that found on most demesnes. ⁹⁴ The figures leave us without a satisfactory basis for generalization, apart from observing that peasant land was not obviously deprived of manure.

A guide to productivity should come from rent payments, which ought to be related to the output of land. Customary and leasehold rents often varied between 3d and 8d per acre, and tended not to change, reflecting the arrangements made in some earlier period. Lords felt some restraint from making changes to annual rents, leading to the entry fine rather than the annual rent payment rising and falling with the demand for land. Rents per acre were influenced by the fertility of the soil and profits of cultivation, represented most clearly by the contrast in Gloucestershire between the high rents for customary land of 12d in the Severn estuary and the mediocre 4d–8d often found on the Cotswolds. The most remarkable indication of high yields near the Severn comes from the leasehold rents introduced on the Berkeley estate on such manors as Slimbridge in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, which reached such astronomic figures as 34d per acre. ⁹⁵ Peasants were prepared to pay such sums, which must mean that they expected to be producing much more than 7 bushels per acre. Relatively high returns must also explain the entry fines of 10 marks (£6 13s 4d) per yardland, around 4s 5d per acre, found in various parts of the region in the early fourteenth century (see ‘Changing circumstances: Entry fines’ in Chapter 3). If the fine was funded by a loan, the repayments over a number of years would have depended on a high and consistent surplus of grain.

An indirect pointer to increasing levels of production comes from the proportion of the region’s population living in towns and therefore dependent on rural surpluses for their food. About 12,000 people lived in west midland towns in 1086, double that number in 1200, and around 50,000 in 1300 (see ‘Peasant migration into towns’ in Chapter 8). There were also workers in rural industries and transport who bought their food, and their horses ate grain and legumes. These rising numbers were being fed from the crops produced beyond the subsistence needs of the rural population.

To step aside from the pursuit of hard data for productivity from uncertain sources, we should trust the people who lived through these times and experienced productivity at first hand. They spent scarce money, time, and effort on technical changes involving clearance of new land, innovations in rotation, enclosures, and techniques such as horse hauling and marling. They did this because they considered that these measures benefited them and the output of their holding. They may not have calculated yield ratios or stocking densities, but they had an empirical understanding of the output of their land. Their judgements were appropriate to their own circumstances. In the period between 1375 and 1520 they sold grain because they needed the money, and if prices were low they produced more to maintain a flow of cash. ⁹⁶ They lived in those decades when the basic foodstuffs were cheap because they were plentiful, and that made life easier for the poor and the wage earners The producers of grain suffered no great hardship, as their main profits in the market came from livestock, and our attention will now turn to animal husbandry.

Arable and pasture: Managing change

Arable and grassland were not opposites. At regular intervals in the annual cycle of cultivation, livestock were able to find pasturage on the arable. Part of the arable was sometimes called ‘frisc’, and was uncultivated for a time, but would subsequently be cropped. Faint traces of ridge and furrow suggest that the cultivators temporarily extended the area under the plough, and we know that plots of common pasture might be cultivated with flax crops. The general tendencies are well known: the land under cultivation expanded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and then ceased to grow soon after 1300. The shrinkage in the arable became pronounced from 1350 and it remained in recession around 1500. The underlying causes of these trends are partly related to the rise and fall of the size of the settlements from which the land was cultivated. Many villages doubled in population between 1086 and 1300, and were then halved by the fifteenth century. Demand for grain rose and then fell as the numbers of households diminished, and this was reflected in prices, but the pattern of consumption changed, with an increase in barley and drage as more ale was brewed.

Beginning with the advance of arable before 1300, an impression of the scale of the expansion can be gained from a sample of twenty villages, selected because their landscape history has been the subject of research. An attempt has been made (not without doubts) to estimate the cultivated area in 1086, based on Domesday Book, and again in c.1300. For example, at Hanley Castle in the woodlands of Worcestershire, the inhabitants can plausibly be estimated to have been cultivating 1,200 acres in 1086 and 3,000 acres in 1300, representing a growth by 2.5 times. Other woodland villages in the same county grew by almost four times (at Hanbury) and between four and five times at Pendock. Arable in champion and Cotswold villages increased between 1.2 and 1.9 times, with a greater expansion in the case of Burton Dassett. Taken together these villages reflect a countryside experiencing general extension in cultivation, with some significant differences between landscapes. ⁹⁷ Scientific evidence for changes in vegetation in the Vale of Gloucester come from pollen samples from the fill of a ditch at Haresfield. At the bottom of the ditch deposits of c.1200 contain mainly tree pollen, especially from oak and hazel. The upper fill, dating from the mid-thirteenth century, shows a notable reduction in tree pollen and an increase in pollen deriving from cereals, with weeds including those associated with disturbed ground. There was also evidence of grazed grassland. ⁹⁸

After 1300 the trends were sometimes contradictory. Some assarting was reported in the Forest of Dean as late as the 1340s. Land was being reclaimed from the marshes of the Severn estuary, but this seems to be an initiative of the Berkeley family rather than the local peasants. ⁹⁹ However peasants were reported in 1341 leaving their holdings in the Cotswolds, and at the same time land fell out of cultivation. ¹⁰⁰ Individual tenants and sometimes groups of them were abandoning their holdings, such as four of the twenty tenants at Fulbrook (Warwickshire) in 1325. ¹⁰¹ An idea of general developments in the years after 1300 and subsequently can be gained from final concords, that is, records of transfers of land registered in the royal courts, which indicate the use of land mainly on the holdings of free tenants, but also occasionally on demesnes. A typical example will tell us that a conveyance concerned twenty acres of land (meaning arable), an acre of meadow, and two of pasture. These figures were not based on detailed surveys, but give an impression based on the judgement of contemporary observers. They are imprecise, but inform us of trends over three centuries. ¹⁰²

The figures for Gloucestershire in Table 6.1 show clear movements in two regions, the wold and Vale. At the beginning of the series arable was overwhelmingly prominent, partly because the pasture would be associated with a holding, but the quantity could not be given an area—it was a share in a common resource. Similarly it was often taken for granted that each yardland had an acre or two of meadow attached to it. In indicating the size of a piece of land, the amount of arable mattered most, and the rest could be assumed. The dominance of arable in the records can be seen to diminish in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, but decisive movement came in the early years of the fifteenth century, and the rise in pasture seems especially marked after 1448. There are differences in details between the wolds and Vale, but the overall impression is that fifteenth-century Gloucestershire saw a significant move, not just from arable to pasture, but from arable to the types of enclosed or separate pasture that could register with those compiling the final concords. This development was not confined to the wolds where pasture has traditionally been seen as significant, but also in the mixed landscapes of the Vale.

Table 6.1 Land use in Gloucestershire from final concords (percentages)

The story is to some extent duplicated in Warwickshire’s final concords, but the differences between the landscape divisions is much more pronounced. Both Arden and Feldon are represented by the fines as dominated by arable around 1300, but the first hints of change in the mid-fourteenth century were confined to the Arden, with more land being recorded as wood (13 per cent) and pasture (7 per cent). Significant change according to the final concords for the Arden came in the mid-fifteenth century, when the recorded pasture increased to 45 per cent and remained at that level after 1500. In the Feldon pasture around 1500 stood at 33 per cent, with arable at 57 per cent. ¹⁰³

The conclusion that seems to emerge from these impressionistic figures from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire is the importance of the fifteenth century when perceptions of the countryside were revised, and behind that change of mind real developments were presumably taking place. However, perhaps the Warwickshire Feldon, though registering less pasture than in the woodlands, felt the impact of the introduction of grazing land more acutely, as permanent pasture before 1400 had been limited in extent. All of this affected peasants profoundly, and to some extent arose from peasant initiatives.

The extents attached to Inquisitions Post Mortem were focussed on the lords’ demesnes, and are therefore not directly comparable with the final concords, but it is useful to see confirmation of the trends, which were clearly shared by lords and peasants in the fifteenth century. Gloucestershire, and especially in the Vale, experienced a surge in pasture and a pronounced drop in arable in the early years of the century, while the same was delayed in Warwickshire until after 1485. As in the final concords, the Arden around 1500 had shed more arable and gained more pasture and wood than the Feldon. ¹⁰⁴ From the late fourteenth century onwards demesnes were increasingly coming into the hands of peasant lessees, who could have made decisions to change arable to pasture.

The tithe records from Worcestershire, which reveal so much about the crops grown in different places and times, can also shed light on the volume of arable production at a crucial time in the fifteenth century. Table 6.2 shows that the demesne managers were more ready than the tithe-paying villagers to scale down their arable production, perhaps because they were more sensitive to the decline in market demand. The lords’ officials and the peasants resembled one another in that their regional environment influenced their decisions. Lords and peasant alike in the woodlands were more averse to arable cultivation than were their counterparts in the champion. This suggests a serious agricultural recession, but if we had a full series of tithe records, they would show rising output from beef cattle, dairy produce, flitches of bacon, and the other products from animal husbandry. The woodland, already a markedly pastoral countryside, became even more pastoral. This was also the case in the Arden across the county boundary.

Table 6.2 Reduction in the quantity of crops estimated from thirteen parishes, all on the Worcester Cathedral Priory estate, between 1400–13 and 1416–62

Champion parishes, demesne crops	22%
Champion parishes, tithe corn	13%
Woodland parishes, demesne crops	34%
Woodland parishes, tithe corn	27%

Source: Dyer, ‘Tithe Estimates’, pp. 90–1.

The dry statistics of the use of land are valuable in showing unequivocally the consequences of the ups and downs in the numbers of consumers and producers, prices and rents, and all of the other variable factors at work. Change in climate was a factor for which there is little precise information from the region, but which must have been having an influence because it affected the whole of Europe. Relatively warm and stable conditions provided a context for agricultural and urban growth in the thirteenth century; unstable weather was associated with the crises of the fourteenth century; and adverse trends, including falling temperatures, were the backdrop for the recession of the fifteenth century. ¹⁰⁵ Climatic adversity, along with the expense of war, civil conflict, shortage of bullion, and successive epidemics all formed the environment in which peasants lived and worked. They did not give up in despair, but adapted to circumstances, and found solutions to many of the problems they encountered.As well as examining regional and wider statistical trends, we can see how individuals behaved. These people feature in the court proceedings of Cleeve Prior (Worcestershire) and we can trace the reduction in arable farming and understand some of the pressures behind the moves (Figure 6.4). A series of comments begins in 1347 with the statement that ‘Robert Droght does not cultivate his land competently’, and Henry Long does not cultivate ‘as he ought’, which might refer to unskilled handling of the plough, or to a departure from the rules of rotation. ¹⁰⁶ A more straightforward report came from 1352 when Alice Robynes was said to be allowing her house to decay and leaving her land uncultivated because she was poor and incapable. ¹⁰⁷ This appears to have been a social welfare problem with a retreat from arable husbandry as a by-product. A succession of complaints of non-cultivation came mainly from the years between 1374 and 1424, which were followed in 1453–62 by a significant flurry of general orders addressed to ‘all tenants’. Specific holdings, from a quarter yardland to whole yardlands were said to be lacking in cultivation, but the neglect did not necessarily mean that there was no ploughing at all. Some tenants did not do their fallow ploughing, or did not double plough the fallow according to the best practice. Some tenants ploughed most of their land but omitted some parcels, like the tenant who ploughed his selions (strips) but not the headlands. Another fault was not to plough at the correct time. A particular problem troubling the people of Cleeve was the consequence of a change in river channels, which left part of the fields on the other side of the river, ‘beyond the Avon’. Tenants seem to have co-ordinated their choices by agreeing to leave the inaccessible land lying frisc (uncultivated). They also seem to have collectively chosen land near the village, ‘the furlong near the closes of their tenures’ to lie uncultivated, according to a report of 1462, finding it convenient to have animals grazing where they could be easily supervised. ¹⁰⁸ Most tenants seem to have grown crops on part of their holdings, and left the rest frisc, making the selection on the basis of convenience and fertility. These choices were being made by tenants with large holdings, such as William Carles, who held 64 acres in 1420. Faced with the formidable amount of time, effort, and money to plough so many acres, he decided to leave some untilled. In 1447 tenants were grazing horses on the frisc by tethering them, to avoid damaging the crops on adjacent land. ¹⁰⁹ A number of tenants at Cleeve Prior used land in the open fields to quarry stone, which prevented cultivation (see ‘Industry within peasant society’ in Chapter 9). The tithe corn total in Cleeve parish was reduced from 82 quarters around 1402 to 55 quarters near to 1448, meaning a loss to cultivation of at least 200 acres. Behind these totals for the whole village lie many stories of individuals reacting to falling demand.

Figure 6.4 Cleeve Prior, Worcestershire. A map of 1772 provides the main evidence for the strips and furlongs of the open fields, supplemented by lidar data and field observation. The nucleated village has a cluster plan; the large arable area is typical of the champion country in the Vale of Evesham. The course of the river changed, hence part of the fields lying on the opposite bank. Village and fields are likely to have been fully formed by thirteenth century (source: WCL, Map 12).

The reports of non-cultivation at Cleeve Prior serve as a reminder that no development in peasant farming was accomplished without opposition and argument within the community. The reports in the manor court of land lying frisc, being grazed by animals, or being used as quarries came from neighbours reporting the offences against customary land management. Unploughed land could threaten neighbours from the growth of weeds and the straying of animals that escaped their tethers. Uncoordinated conversion to pasture threatened the orderly rotation of crops.

Conclusion

West-midland peasants managed their own fields through largely undocumented village meetings, which communicated with the manor courts. They inherited their fields from earlier periods, but far from being trapped in the legacy of the past made major adaptations. Every move was contentious, but resistance to change was not born from a mindless conservatism, but from rational calculations of disadvantage. Assarting, the enclosure of wastes, changes in rotation, piecemeal enclosure, enclosure by agreement, the protection of existing hedges, the conversion of arable to leys, all met with opposition. Nonetheless changes were made, though those advocating new methods could on occasion be prevented. It cannot be proved that changes led to advances in productivity, but it seems likely that the intelligent, well-informed, and selfish advocates of inhoking, enclosure, adoption of leys, and other measures expected to increase their profits. Reforms to cultivation were likely to have been prevented by those who were liable to lose grazing or crops. The expansion of arable in the thirteenth century, and the rise of pastoralism in the fifteenth, were examples of radical innovations with clear benefits for those pressing them forwards.

In addition to these strategic changes to cultivation, peasants were also making incremental changes to their techniques, in their employment of horses, choice of crops, application of scythes to the grain harvest, provision of secure storage, and modifications in manuring and marling. All of this amounts to an environment of innovation, both large and small, which demonstrates peasant adaptability.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0006

¹ B.K. Roberts, ‘Field Systems of the West Midlands’, in Studies in the Field Systems in the British Isles, edited by A.H.R. Baker and R.A. Butlin (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 188–231; R.H. Hilton, ‘Old Enclosure in the West Midlands’, Annales de L’Est 21(1959), pp. 272–83.

² T. Williamson, Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society, Environment (Macclesfield, 2003).

³ M. McKerracher, Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England: Agriculture in the Long Eighth Century (Oxford, 2018); D. Hooke, The Anglo-Saxon Landscape: The Kingdom of the Hwicce (Manchester, 1985), pp. 154–65, 190–226.

⁴ C. Dyer, E. Thoen, and T. Williamson, eds., Peasants and Their Fields: The Rationale of Open-Field Agriculture, c.700–1800 (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 1–4, 257–75.

⁵ D. Hall, The Open Fields of England (Oxford, 2014), pp. 95–105.

⁶ GA, D11718/61/B1; Badminton muniments D2700 MJ9/1–2.

⁷ WA, ref. 705.134, BA 1531/69B.

⁸ WCL, E34.

⁹ WCL, E13; GA, Badminton muniments D2700 MJ12/1; Berkeley Castle Muniments, A1/1/96 (microfilm).

¹⁰ T. John, ‘Change in Medieval Warwickshire, Domesday Book to the Hundred Rolls of 1279–1280’, Local Population Studies 59 (1997), pp. 41–53; C. Dyer, Hanbury. Settlement and Society in a Woodland Landscape (University of Leicester Centre for English Local History Occasional Paper, 4,1991), p. 28.

¹¹ R. Jones and M. Page, Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: Beginnings and Ends (Macclesfield, 2006), pp. 105–29.

¹² S. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009), pp. 45–81. I am grateful to Jane Croom for showing me her list of Warwickshire’s medieval parks: she has found ninety.

¹³ D.M. Stenton, ed., Rolls of the Justices in Eyre for Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire, 1221, 1222 (Selden Society 59, 1940), p. 233 (Ashow case).

¹⁴ D. Walker, ed., The Cartulary of St Augustine’s Bristol (BRS 10, 1998), pp. 234–8.

¹⁵ C. Dyer, ‘Conflict in the Landscape: The Enclosure Movement in England, 1220–1349’, Landscape History 29 (2007), pp. 21–33.

¹⁶ R.H. Hilton, A Medieval Society. The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1983), p. 152; C. Dyer, An Age of Transition. Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), pp. 58–62.

¹⁷ RBW, p. 215.

¹⁸ RBW, pp. 280–8, 292–4.

¹⁹ J.M. Wilson and C. Gordon, eds., Early Compotus Rolls of the Priory of Worcester (WHS, 1908), pp. 22–3, 31, 40.

²⁰ Roberts, ‘Field Systems’, pp. 206–9; Hall, Open Fields, p. 262; VCH Glouc, 8, pp. 224; 10, pp. 250, 261; 11, p. 194.

²¹ H.S.A. Fox, ‘The Alleged Transformation from Two-Field to Three-Field Systems in Medieval England’, EcHR, 2nd series, 39 (1986), pp. 526–48.

²² D. Royce, ed., Landboc sive Registrum Monasterii Beatae Mariae Virginis … de Winchelcumba (Exeter, 1892, vol. 2, pp. 297–8.

²³ WCL, E14.

²⁴ WCL, E28, E29.

²⁵ WCL, E1; CR Elmley, pp. 112–13.

²⁶ WCL, E33.

²⁷ TNA, SC2 175/77.

²⁸ GA, P329/1, MI/1.

²⁹ R.K. Field, ‘The Worcestershire Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages’ (MA dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1962), pp. 81–4.

³⁰ WA, ref. 705:56, BA3910/27 (xviii).

³¹ WAM, 21161.

³² WCL, E214.

³³ SRO, D(w)1788/P33/B5.

³⁴ L.D.W. Smith, ‘A Survey of Building Timber and other Trees in the Hedgerows of a Warwickshire Estate c.1500’, TBWAS 90 (1980), pp. 65–73.

³⁵ Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B317; GA, D471/M2; TNA, SC2/175/52; GA, Badminton muniments D2700 MJ11/1/2.

³⁶ Magdalen College, Oxford, Quinton EP 35/9 (collecting hedging plants in 1430–1); TNA, SC2/175/55.

³⁷ TNA, SC2/175/55.

³⁸ SCLA, DR5/2758; C. Dyer, Warwickshire Farming, 1349-c.1520 (DS Occasional Paper, 27, 1981), p. 26.

³⁹ SCLA, DR5/2756.

⁴⁰ M. De Moor, The Dilemma of the Commoners. Understanding the Use of Common Pool Resources in Long-Term Perspective (Cambridge, 2015); A.J.L. Winchester, ‘Property Rights, “Good Neighbourhood” and Sustainability in the Management of Common Land in England and Wales, 1235–1965’, in Rural Societies and Environments at Risk, edited by B. Van Bavel and E. Thoen (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 309–29.

⁴¹ J.R. Wordie, ‘The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914’, EcHR, second series, 36 (1983), pp. 483–505.

⁴² WCL, C500–C520, and Hereford Cathedral Library R704 were the estimationes bladorum which predicted (without too much inaccuracy) demesne crops and the tithes: C. Dyer, ‘Peasant Farming in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Tithe Estimates of Worcester Cathedral Priory’, in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy: Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell, edited by M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon, and P.R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 83–109.

⁴³ A. Sabin, ed., Some Manorial Accounts of St Augustine’s Abbey, Bristol (Bristol Record Society, 22, 1960), pp. 106–8; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, B14/2/3/6; TNA, SC6 1039/14.

⁴⁴ WAM, 21034–21037, 21039, 21040, 21043, 21045; WCL, E14.

⁴⁵ WCL, E26.

⁴⁶ WCL, C510, C505.

⁴⁷ WCL, E64; on flexibility of peasant production, B. Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes 1270–1536 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 132–61.

⁴⁸ A.D. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973), p. 167; J.M. Wilson, ed., Accounts of the Priory of Worcester 1521–2 (WHS, 1907), pp. 7–8; M.D. Harris, ed., The Coventry Leet Book, part 3 (Early English Text Society, Original Series, 138, 1909), pp. 674–5.

⁴⁹ D. Enright and M. Watts, A Romano-British and Medieval Settlement Site at Stoke Road, Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire (BGAS Archaeological Report, 1, 2002), p. 53; M. Watts, ed., Prehistoric and Medieval Occupation at Moreton-in-Marsh and Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire (BGAS Archaeological Report, 5, 2007), p.44. For the other sites see notes 27, 33, and 34 in Chapter 5. The report on burnt grain from Burton Dassett Southend can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

⁵⁰ M. Winterbottom, ed., William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificorum Anglorum (Oxford, 2007), p. 445.

⁵¹ WA, ref. 009:1, BA 2636/166/92235; Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, the plant economy report can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492; Gloucester Public Library, R59.2, R59.4, dated 1388–9 and 1487.

⁵² WAM, 8247.

⁵³ J. Greig, ‘The Investigation of a Medieval Barrel Latrine from Worcester’, Journal of Archaeological Science 8 (1981), pp. 265–82.

⁵⁴ GA, GDR 40/T2.

⁵⁵ CR Elmley, p. 174.

⁵⁶ Lincolnshire Record Office, 2 Anc 2/10/1.

⁵⁷ C. Briggs, ‘Monitoring Demesne Managers through the Manor Court Before and After the Black Death’, in Survival and Discord in Medieval Society, edited by R. Goddard, J. Langdon, and M. Muller (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 179–95.

⁵⁸ D. Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford, 1971), p. 473.

⁵⁹ SCLA, DR98/865–6; WCL, C506.

⁶⁰ WCL, E34, E24.

⁶¹ WCL, E10.

⁶² D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005), pp. 109–13.

⁶³ J. Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 127–41.

⁶⁴ RBW, pp. 281, 293; Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation, pp. 246–50.

⁶⁵ The publication of the excavated sites are to be found in notes 27, 33, and 34 in Chapter 5. The small finds report for Burton Dassett Southend can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

⁶⁶ R.K. Field, ‘Worcestershire Peasant Buildings, Household Goods and Farming Equipment in the Later Middle Ages’, Med Arch 9 (1965), p. 138.

⁶⁷ CR Elmley, p. 148.

⁶⁸ J. Myrdal and A. Sapoznik, ‘Technology, Labour and Productivity Potential in Peasant Agriculture: England c.1000–1348’, AgHR 65 (2017), pp. 194–212.

⁶⁹ SRO, D(W)1788/P39/B10; WAM, 21123; WCL, E30; Z. Razi, ‘Family, Land and the Village Community in Later Medieval England’, P&P 93(1981), p.10; R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in The Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 48–50.

⁷⁰ TNA, PROB2/457.

⁷¹ Langdon, Horses, Oxen, pp. 235–41; RBW, p. 270. This privilege would cover only a fraction of the ploughing needed for a number of holdings, but it shows that lending ploughing capacity was a well-established practice.

⁷² See the archaeological reports cited in note 49 of this chapter, and notes 27, 33, and 34 in Chapter 5; the botanical report for Burton Dassett Southend can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

⁷³ Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, pp. 147–57.

⁷⁴ WCRO, CR1886/42.

⁷⁵ Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 50.

⁷⁶ GA, Badminton muniments, D2700 MJ11/1/2; WCL, E34.

⁷⁷ R.L.C. Jones, ‘Signatures in the Soil: The Use of Pottery in Manure Scatters in the Identification of Medieval Arable Farming Regimes’, Archaeological Journal 161 (2004), pp. 159–88; C. Dyer, ‘Medieval Pottery from the Admington Survey’, Medieval Settlement Research Group Annual Report 13 (1998), pp. 24–5; C. Dyer, ‘Compton Verney: Landscape and People in the Middle Ages’, in Compton Verney: A History of the House and its Owners, edited by R. Bearman (Stratford-upon-Avon, 2000), pp. 66–7.

⁷⁸ These observations are based on the author’s field work.

⁷⁹ Magdalen College, Oxford, Willoughby EP 68/9.

⁸⁰ A. Watkins, ed., The Early Records of Coleshill (DS 51, 2018), p. 255; W.D. Shannon, ‘“An Excellent Improver of the Soil”: Marl and the Landscape of Lowland Lancashire’, AgHR 68(2020), pp. 141–67; Dyer, ‘Compton Verney’, p. 67.

⁸¹ J. Rohrkasten, ed., The Worcester Eyre of 1275 (WHS, new series, 22, 2008), pp. 337–8.

⁸² Archaeological reports cited in note 49 of this chapter, and notes 27, 33, and 34 in Chapter 5; the botanical reports for Burton Dassett Southend can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492; L. Moffett, ‘The Archaeology of Medieval Plant Foods’, in Food in Medieval England, edited by C.M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford, 2006), pp. 47–53.

⁸³ E.S. Fegan, ed., Journal of Prior William More (WHS, 1914), pp. 350–2.

⁸⁴ Field, ‘Worcestershire Peasant Buildings’, pp. 134–6; N.W. Alcock, ed., Cruck Construction: An Introduction and Catalogue (CBA Research Report 42, 1981), pp. 117–19, 121–6, 156–8.

⁸⁵ Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, pp. 134, 182–4.

⁸⁶ Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley, p. 475.

⁸⁷ C. Dyer, ‘Evidence for Helms in Gloucestershire in the Fourteenth Century’, Vernacular Architecture 15 (1984), pp. 42–5.

⁸⁸ Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, pp. 60, 178–9.

⁸⁹ WA, ref.705:56, BA 3910/27; ref. 009:1, BA2636/92225 4/8; WCL, E34.

⁹⁰ B.M.S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 306–85.

⁹¹ WAM, 8282; Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 201–2.; Dyer, Warwickshire Farming, pp. 29–30.

⁹² Campbell, Seigniorial Agriculture, pp. 172–83.

⁹³ C. Dyer, ‘A Medieval Village in a Cotswold Landscape: Pinbury in Duntisbourne Rouse’, TBGAS 137 (2019), pp. 208, 209; Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 42; SRO, D641/1/4C/7; WA, ref. 705:4, BA 54.

⁹⁴ For example, at Oddington (Gloucestershire) a stint of 4 cattle, 3 horses, and 40 sheep on a 30-acre yardland would give a ratio of 79 per 100 acres; GA, D621/M8.

⁹⁵ B. Wells-Furby, The Berkeley Estate 1281–1417. Its Economy and Development (BGAS, 2012), pp. 89–118.

⁹⁶ D. Farmer, ‘Prices and Wages’, in Agricultural History of England and Wales, volume 3, edited by E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 443–55.

⁹⁷ This is based on a sample of villages on which both detailed documentary and landscape research has been conducted: Glouc: Bibury, Bishop’s Cleeve, Hazleton, Hidcote, Pinbury, Roel; Warwicks: Admington, Baddesley Clinton, Compton Scorpion, Burmington, Burton Dassett, Compton Verney, Hampton Lucy, Lark Stoke, Long Compton, Quinton, Welford-on-Avon, Weston-juxta-Cherrington; Worcs: Hanbury, Hanley Castle, Pendock.

⁹⁸ M. Brett and J. Hart, ‘Land at Quedgley East, Haresfield, Gloucestershire (unpublished report, Cotswold Archaeology, CR0078_1, 2019), pp. 28, 83–6.

⁹⁹ E.A. Fry, ed., Abstracts of the IPMs for Gloucestershire, part 5, 1302–58 (British Record Society, 40, 1910), p. 315; J.R. Allen, ‘A Short History of Salt Marsh Reclamation at Slimbridge Warth and Neighbouring Areas, Gloucestershire’, TBGAS 104 (1986), pp. 139–55.

¹⁰⁰ Nonarum Inquisitiones in Curia Scaccarii (Record Commission, 1807), pp. 407–15; C.R. Elrington, ‘Assessments of |Gloucestershire. Fiscal Records in Local History’, TBGAS 103(1985), pp. 5–16.

¹⁰¹ TNA, C134/41/3.

¹⁰² M. Davis and J. Kissock,‘The Feet of Fines, the Land Market and the English Agricultural Crisis of 1315–1321’, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004), pp. 215–30.

¹⁰³ A. Watkins, ‘Cattle Grazing in the Forest of Arden in the Later Middle Ages’, AgHR 37(1989), p. 21; Dyer, Warwickshire Farming, p. 10.

¹⁰⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Landscape, Farming and Society in an English Region: Inquisitions Post Mortem for the West Midlands, 1250–1509’, in The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside and Rural Society, edited by M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 59–83.

¹⁰⁵ B.M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition. Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World (Cambridge, 2016).

¹⁰⁶ WCL, E15.

¹⁰⁷ WCL, E17.

¹⁰⁸ WCL, E66.

¹⁰⁹ WCL, E61.